I Won't Give Up
by LoveFromAzkaban
Summary: Holly refuses to give up on Artemis.


_I won't give up on us  
Even if the skies get rough  
I'm giving you all my love  
I'm still looking up  
_

_- _I Won't Give Up, Jason Mraz

* * *

His beauty was dazzling but it hurt to look at him; it was like having the sun in your eyes. With pale, nimble hands moving over bits and pieces of wires and coils, fusing copper ends and pulling apart anything that doesn't fit, his blue eyes never rest, darting around with rapt attention, following the movements' of his hands. It never ceased to amaze Holly how a young human could be so precocious, and it never ceases to hurt like a stab wound.

"How do you do that?" she asked, her voice echoing in the cold, cavernous room. A bird flits by the window above, a flutter of black wings against a bone white sky, shadows flickering in a shaft of light against the wall. "How do you know how to do all this? I'll never understand."

"I won't either, Captain Short." His voice is quiet, his eyes never moving from the task at hand. "I'll never understand."

She fell quiet and swallowed around some sort of lump in her throat. She continued to stare at him, while simultaneously trying to tear her eyes away. There wasn't much else to look at. The laboratory was cold and dank, the only window obstructed by crates and twisted scraps of metal she couldn't begin to fathom that cast strange shadows in the gloom. The room felt like a refrigerator, and she wondered why he wasn't shivering in little more than that flimsy lab coat. Perhaps he was used to the cold by now. She was not. Fairies will never be used to the cold, and she especially. You'd think, after all that time, after Arctic expeditions and misadventures in Iceland and diving into frigid open waters, she'd be used to it, but she wasn't. Cold is just the absence of heat, he told her once, and this absence was all she could feel now.

"So, what are you making?" she asked, casually picking up a wire and inspecting it as if she had any clue what purpose it served. "A little toy?"

He didn't even grant her an indignant glare.

"Right," she said when he didn't answer. "What's a Fowl without his secrets? I suppose I'll find out in due time. I wonder if -"

"Why do you stay here, Captain?"

The words startled her.

"What?" she said. "What do you-"

"You know what I mean. Please do not insult my intelligence. Why do you stay when there is no purpose anymore? Why are you waiting around?" He looked up from what he was doing for the first time, his large blue eyes burning into hers with a rare show of emotion blazing there. It felt like a knife was jammed into her gut, and for the first time, it occurred to her that it must hurt him too, for all the same reasons. "You know there's no hope."

"I'm -" she stopped and fumbled for what to say. "I'm here for you."

"No, you're not. You're here for him."

Every part of her ran cold as the air and her breath hitched in her throat. Her stomach tied itself into a knot and didn't release, her heart beating faster than wings against her ribs.

The truth is harder to hide from once someone speaks it out loud.

"You see him when you look at me," he said, but his tone wasn't even accusatory. It didn't need to be. They both already knew. "It's alright. Everyone does. Everyone who looks at me sees him where I stand. Everyone except me." He frowns, his hands falling still. His eyebrows furrow as if with frustration, his fist clenching around a wire. "I can't see him in me at _all_."

"I'm sorry. But it'll be alright, you know. It'll be fine, soon."

"No, it won't be." He looked up and when his eyes met hers, they were brimming with tears. "My brother isn't coming back."

"Myles, listen to me. Artemis was...is...special. He's done things no one has ever been able to do. He's brought Butler back to life. He even brought me back to life. He traveled through time. He saved the world. He's unstoppable. If anyone can come back from death, it's him."

"No!" Myles snapped, and for the first time, he looked like the five year old he really was, and less like the fifteen year old he resembled. "Don't you see, Holly? Don't you see? You and Butler have so much faith in him, but faith has never saved anyone. Only facts and science and physics can work wonders, and all of those things tell me death is permanent."

Holly's heart wrenched in her chest.

"You make things worse by being here. Every time you appear, Beckett thinks Artemis will be right behind you. Your insistence that he will return is breaking my mother's heart. She wants to believe it but she can't. And Butler never leaves his quarters. He sits inside in the dark all day, waiting."

Holly stared straight ahead at some point on the wall, unblinking. Her eyes were prickling.

"You were my brother's best friend, so you are my friend too," he said. "But as long as you're here, you'll never let go, and nobody else will be able to either. You need to let go, Captain. We all do."

She let out a wavering breath that had been trapped in her chest and gripped the edge of the steel table. She shook her head, sporadically, the room rattling in her vision as she got up from the chair.

"No," she said, banishing the idea before she allowed herself to think of it. She turned away from him and closed her eyes, the unshed tears searing behind closed lids. "I won't. Artemis wouldn't."

Then it suddenly hit her that, he not only _wouldn't _give up, but he _didn't._

"Captain-"

She remembered dying. It was the strangest memory she had, because it began again right after it cut off, like a video loop. She was lying on the ground, blood seeping out of the wound in her chest, as red as the overhead sky. Everything seemed to be bleeding. She turned and called out Artemis' name, asking him to help her, and he didn't. He looked over at her from where he knelt beside the bomb and their eyes met for a moment before his flickered away. Then there was a blinding light, and everything flickered away.

But it didn't end there. She was suddenly back on her feet again, battling alongside the others, as if nothing had happened. She turned around and there was Artemis, standing shock still in the middle of the fray, just looking at her. She didn't understand at the moment, didn't understand why his face was ravaged with a rare display of emotion, why his eyes were filled with tears, but she understood now. She wished she could feel what he felt it that moment. She wished she could be more like him. That she could reach back and undo what had been done. To pull someone back from the void of death.

And she remembered descending from flight on a London street, where Artemis was looking up at her. She remembered the desperate look on his face, the blood on his clothes, the way he pleaded with her. The astonishment she'd felt when she'd discovered what he'd done with cryogenics, his clever way of getting her to come to him, all to save his friend.

"Captain -"

"No, Myles," she turned, her face blazing with defiance. When she met his gaze, her eyes were glinting with determination. "I will _not _give up."

She sat down on the bench beside him, and he looked up at her with wide eyes. He opened his mouth, but for the first time, he seemed to have nothing to say.

With painful slowness, she reached up and cupped his cheek in her hand, the warmth of his flesh burning the cold tips of her fingers, the only warmth in a world gone cold.

_Cold is just the absence of heat._

She rested her forehead against his and marveled over his face, at the large blue eyes fringed with dark lashes, the wide, childlike brow and pointed chin, the small button nose. The fine black hair that she softly smoothed back with her hand. Her heart fluttered with affection then clenched with a stab of pain when she remembered who it was she was looking at.

_It isn't him.  
_

"I'll bring him back," she whispered. "I promise."

She placed a kiss against his forehead, her eyelashes brushing his skin.

"I promise."

He looked away, bashful, but didn't wipe away the kiss like he would with Angeline. She ruffled his hair and took her seat across the table again, where she had been sitting for the past hour, and they fell into silence. He resumed whatever it was he was he working on, and she quietly stared, transfixed by the movements of his hands.

"It's a phone," he said after a while.

She looked up curiously.

"A phone?"

The jumble of wires and bolts didn't look like a phone. It didn't look much like anything in existence.

"It's not a normal phone," he admitted, appearing reluctant to part with this information. "It's supposed to be a phone that can...that can contact the dead. Deliver messages. Or receive them."

Holly was thrown off. Before she could even ask, he rushed forward into an explanation.

"The science is impossible. It'll never work. I don't know why I am wasting my time on something so silly and childish," he said, and Holly laughed at the absurdity of a five year old saying this. "But I felt like I had to try to do _something. _I felt that's what he...what Artemis would do."

Holly smiled.

"That's called having faith, Myles."

After a long moment's pause, he smiled back.

"I suppose it is."

* * *

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